1550nm LiDAR Damaged Sony Camera at CES

Arstechnica reports that a man who snapped Aeye LiDAR at CES claims that the 1550nm LiDAR permanently damaged his expensive Sony ILC camera. Every image he takes now has two bright spots with vertical and horizontal lines emanating from them (click and download the full resolution images to see the fine details):

AEye CEO Luis Dussan stressed that AEye lidars pose no danger to human eyes in an email to Arstechnica. But he didn't deny that AEye's lidars can cause damage to camera sensors. AEye has offered to buy a new camera instead of the damaged one.

"Cameras are up to 1000x more sensitive to lasers than eyeballs," Dussan wrote. "Occasionally, this can cause thermal damage to a camera's focal plane array."

The 1550nm LiDARs leverage the fact that this wavelength is absorbed in the eye before it reaches the retina, and dramatically increase the laser power. AEye is reported to use a powerful fiber laser. While remaining light safe, that high power apparently can damage image sensors inside cameras.